Wednesday, July 19, 2006

RMW Web Publishing's lead web developer is a volunteer member of the rural bush fire brigade in Kurrajong, which located west of Sydney. The brigade recently set-up a computer with internet access for it's members. Many of the members do not have internet access at home, so having a community based connection is a great way to allow people access to the web. The brigade also has a lot of members that do not attend the weekly meetings but still have a strong interest in the brigade and it's activities. To better serve all the members and other members of the community a member of the brigade set-up a free blog which would be used to update visitors on the latest events. Unfortunately a blog is not the best tool for displaying date centric content. So our developer took on the task of building a site that would best suite the brigade.

It's early days yet, but in our spare time we are working on a new site that will be quite functional and allow members to update the site's content with ease. We have already began setting up an environment from which the site will expand. So far we have brought a domain name kurrjongrfs.org.au and provided hosting. We have also setup a partnership with Google to provide email storage for members with the ability to use Gmail's excellent online webmail package allowing members to access email from any internet connected computer. We are also using Google Calendar which allows multiple members to add events of interest in an easy to use interface. This information is then shown on the site making it easy for users to see, at a glance, what is planned.

What good is a site that can not be found? Currently the Kurrajong RFS site does not appear in either of the big 3's (Google, Yahoo! & MSN) search results. RMW Web Publishing has chosen to case study the process of getting the new site indexed and log the process of climbing the search result ladder to a number 1 position. You can follow along with this study by subscribing to the shared Google calendar.

We look forward to releasing a new site for the brigade and the Kurrajong community soon.